Phalcon Cookbook

By David Schissler and Serghei Iakovlev

If you are a beginner-to-intermediate Phalcon developer who wants to level up or an advanced user who is seeking some new techniques and insight, then this book is perfect for you. This book will be relevant to you over a long period of time due to the mixed nature of this book in providing both abstract comprehension as well as specific examples meant to be usable in your projects. You will be able to experiment with each new aspect of integration in prebuilt recipes meant to best illustrate each specific feature. This will save you lots of time getting up to speed before attempting to integrate into a real application.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Release date: Nov 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781784391997

Book preview

Table of Contents

Phalcon Cookbook

Credits

About the Authors

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

eBooks, discount offers, and more

Why Subscribe?

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Sections

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There’s more…

See also

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Getting Used to Phalcon

Introduction

Getting your IDE to work nicely with Phalcon

Getting ready

How to do it…

Ways to enable Phalcon API autocompletion in major IDEs

PhpStorm

NetBeans

Ways to enable Volt syntax highlighting in major IDEs

Netbeans

PhpStorm

Syntax highlighting for Sublime Text or TextMate

Installation via Package Control

Manual installation

How it works…

Creating the application directory structure

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Setting up your request entry point

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Easily loading code on demand

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

Setting up your request entry point

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

Understanding the request life cycle

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works...

There's more…

See also

2. Structuring Your Projects

Introduction

Choosing the best place for an implementation

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Automation of routine tasks

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

Creating the application structure by using code generation tools

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

Get more power by adding a middleware between Phalcon and your application

Getting ready

How to do it…

Logging critical errors

Changing the description and keywords meta tags depending on your route

Receiving site status reports

Caching pages to reduce processing

Redirecting the user to the login screen if access to the resource is protected

How it works…

There's more…

3. Processing Requests

Introduction

Understanding the default routing strategy for controllers

Getting ready

How to do it…

Handling a request along multiple controllers

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Using flexible key-value action parameter pairs

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Restricting controllers by managing end user privileges

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Making unsuccessful requests fail softly

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Creating a server-sent message server

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Creating a Ratchet Websocket server

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

4. Dealing with Data

Introduction

Preparation

Applying your own naming conventions to models

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Defining relationships between models

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Using the query builder for complex yet fluent model querying

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Being aware of PHQL capabilities

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Fetching models from raw SQL queries

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Getting the most out of your RDBMS of choice

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Using models as information repositories

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Storing models across multiple databases

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

5. Presenting Your Application

Introduction

HTML fragments for AJAX-based applications

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

See also

Splitting your layout structure

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Volt and dynamic view implementations

Getting ready…

How to do it…

How it works…

Presenting models nicely

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

See also

Reusing view snippets

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Creating your own Volt keywords and methods

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

6. Making Use of Advanced Features

Introduction

Registering dependencies in an effective way

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

See also

Using the DI container on different scopes

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

See also

Unleashing the real power of event driven programming

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

Centralizing validations for rock solid business rules

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

Complex routing with regular expressions

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

Using in-memory session handlers

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

Handy persistence for controllers and components

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

Transactional controller actions ensuring consistent operations

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

Auditing complex user actions with simplicity

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

7. Debugging and Profiling

Introduction

Improved exception reporting

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Logging server messages to the browser console

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Creating a route test suite

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Handling abnormal terminations

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Detecting slow queries

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

8. Fine Tuning and Optimizing

Introduction

Handling a database timeout

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Precompiling Volt templates for increased performance and security

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Optimizing PHQL queries

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Caching model metadata and query results for faster performance

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

9. High Performance Applications with Phalcon

Introduction

Introduction to asynchronous work by using Beanstalk

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

Implementing a three-level cache to increase performance

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

Cache view fragments or full pages in Phalcon

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

Implementing your own cache adapters

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

Cache data to reduce access to database systems

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

Creating a PHP extension using Zephir

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

Extending Phalcon using Zephir

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

See also

10. Securing Your Applications

Introduction

Securing data with encryption

Getting ready…

How to do it…

How it works…

Securing passwords with hashing

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

Preventing Cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks

Getting ready…

How to do it…

How it works…

Preventing Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks

Getting ready…

How to do it…

How it works…

Implementing alternative access control lists

Getting ready…

How to do it…

How it works…

Using OAuth for account authorization

Getting ready…

How to do it…

How it works…

Index

Phalcon Cookbook

---

Phalcon Cookbook

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: November 2016

Production reference: 1281116

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

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ISBN 978-1-78439-688-6

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Credits

Authors

David Schissler

Serghei Iakovlev

Reviewer

Nikolaos Dimopoulos

Acquisition Editor

Reshma Raman

Content Development Editor

Parshva Sheth

Technical Editor

Rutuja Vaze

Copy Editor

Safis Editing

Project Coordinator

Ritika Manoj

Proofreaders

Safis Editing

Indexer

Tejal Daruwale Soni

Production Coordinator

Aparna Bhagat

Cover Work

Aparna Bhagat

About the Authors

David Schissler was born and raised in Northern California. He received a significant portion of his education from Santa Rosa Junior College, Chico State University, and ultimately received a Bachelor of Computer Science from Sonoma State University.

David started his career as a programmer working with VB.net before transitioning solely into web development. He is a longtime Linux user and is an avid supporter and user of completely open source development platforms, including, the firmware, operating system, programming languages, and text editors.

David is a world traveler who has lived on three different continents for extended periods of time. He is quite comfortable living out of a single bag while developing web software, writing books, and traveling the world.

I would like to thank Bill Wiggins for sharing our dreams and for my profound cafe experiences in many parts of the world. I would like to thank John Gudgeon for giving me that necessary kick and helping me evacuate my apartment so that I could jump onto that fateful sail boat heading south , and my father Jim Schissler for writing puzzle games for the TRS-80 that we hooked up to the living room television. I’d also like to thank everyone that has been supportive of my education and adventures.

Serghei Iakovlev has been working as a Ruby/PHP developer for over 7 years and has been specializing in web application development. As a supporter and advocate of Behavior Driven Development (BDD), he is also a member of the Codeception team.

Serghei can be found neck deep in innovative technologies, which introduced him to Phalcon. He is responsible for the coordination of bug fixes, testing, developer tools, incubator, and supports other Phalcon-related projects.

When he’s not working, Serghei enjoys watching documentaries, science fiction movies, and sometimes plays Mahjong or Go.

I’d like to thank my wife, Yaroslava, for her patience, encouragement, and assistance in translation of my part of the book. I’d also like to thank my technical leader, Andres Gutierrez, for creating such a wonderful framework, and my team mate, Nikolaos Dimopoulos, for his assistance in technical details and for all his recommendations. These people helped me get this book finished.

About the Reviewer

Nikolaos (Nikos) Dimopoulos has over 20 years of progressive experience in designing and developing applications. He is currently serving as a Senior Developer/Analyst for ITWorks Inc. Nikolaos has always been passionate about quality, testability, and good design. Throughout his career, he has been everywhere, from leading the Technical Cooperation Project Monitoring and Management System (TCPMMS) at the UN/International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, to being a main catalyst in the growth of a widely popular online community.

He is constantly curious about new technologies and finds ways to increase the performance of his applications. This led him to discover PhalconPHP a few years back. With his contributions, it was not long before he became a member of the core team, helping with documentation, tests, and other duties.

In his free time, he enjoys time with his family, contributes to open source, writes his thoughts on his blog, and tries to keep up to speed with technology.

I would like to thank my family for all the support they have given me throughout the review of this book. Without it, I would have never made it.

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Preface

Phalcon was created to maximize the performance of PHP applications. Along the way, Phalcon adopted many industry best practices and became a model of what a modern PHP application should look like.

In the beginning, Phalcon was written purely in C language, and this made it difficult for many types of developers to contribute to the project. Starting with version 2.0, the project was rewritten in a new PHP resembling language called Zephir, which allowed many more people to contribute. Recently, with the release of Phalcon 3.0, the framework has begun its first period of long-term support and adherence to semantic versioning.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Used to Phalcon, demonstrates how to start a Phalcon project, configure your IDE to make your work on the project easier, and brings to light the main principles you must understand while dealing with the Phalcon Framework.

Chapter 2, Structuring Your projects, covers the project structure. This chapter demonstrates one of the optional versions of the project structure and helps configuring routing and introduces how to use middlewares in your project.

Chapter 3, Processing Requests, takes you through the process of a normal web request as well as explores the Websockets and EventSource request models.

Chapter 4, Dealing with Data, teaches you to the skills to deal with real data using relations, PHQL, or raw SQL and how to use customized database adapters.

Chapter 5, Presenting Your Application, introduces Views. It covers aspects such as using HTML fragments, working with layout structure, viewing snippets, as well as working with Volt Template Engine.

Chapter 6, Making Use of Advanced Features, covers the strong points of Phalcon Framework, such as dependency injection, validation, working with sessions, event management, complex routing, and so on.

Chapter 7, Debugging and Profiling, demonstrates how to handle the unusual and troublesome aspects of a project.

Chapter 8, Fine Tuning and Optimizing, talks about how to optimize a project for high throughput and reliability.

Chapter 9, High Performance Applications with Phalcon, covers the work with high load projects. You will learn how to work with the message queues and caching. This chapter also introduces Zephir language. It covers the main principles of creating extensions in Zephir and the Phalcon Framework enhancement.

Chapter 10, Securing Your Applications, avoids common attacks and implement an ACL with password hashing.

What you need for this book

This book requires PHP 5.5 or later, a web server, database server, and command line access. Although any web and database server can be used in this book, the reader will have a much easier time with Apache and MySQL. This book makes extensive use of the Phalcon Developer Tools to create projects, and this will require command line usage. Some recipes in this book will require specific PHP extensions and so the reader will need to have the ability to install these extensions on their machine as well as the ability to restart the web and database server, to read the web server logs and many other things that require administrator access. Windows, Mac, and Linux are all supported environments.

Who this book is for

If you are a beginner-to-intermediate Phalcon developer who wants to level up, or an advanced user who is seeking some new techniques and insight, then this book is perfect for you. This book will be relevant to you over a long period of time due to the mixed nature of this book in providing both abstract comprehension as well as specific examples meant to be usable in your projects. You will be able to experiment with each new aspect of integration in prebuilt recipes meant to best illustrate each specific feature. This will save you lots of time getting up to speed before attempting to integrate into a real application.

Sections

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There’s more, and See also).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:

Getting ready

This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.

How to do it…

This section contains the steps required to follow the recipe.

How it works…

This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.

There’s more…

This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.

See also

This section provides helpful links to other useful information for the recipe.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: The stubs are located in the phalcon-devtools repository you just cloned under the /ide subfolder

A block of code is set as follows:

 

class Hats extends Phalcon\Mvc\Model

{

}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$phql = SELECT Hats.* FROM Hats JOIN Colors WHERE Colors.name = ‘red’;

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: Create a user by entering the user name and password and clicking the Create a User button

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Errata

Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in the text or the code—we would be grateful if you could report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the Errata Submission Form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded to our website or added to any list of existing errata under the Errata section of that title.

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Questions

If you have a problem with any aspect of this book, you can contact us at <[e-mail]>, and we will do our best to address the problem.

Chapter 1. Getting Used to Phalcon

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

Getting your IDE to work nicely with Phalcon

Creating the application directory structure

Setting up your request entry point

Easily loading code on demand

Initializing Phalcon to handle a request

Understanding the request life cycle

Introduction

Despite the fact that Phalcon is a framework for PHP application development, it isn't itself PHP-based. Therefore, some difficulties may appear when using syntax highlighting or code autocompletion. In this chapter, we will try to study how to set up autocompletion in a modern Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and how to enable code autocompletion.

An essential step in the architecture process when developing an application is a clear understanding of the project directory structure and the role of each of the directories. We will use a variation of a Phalcon project directory structure, which is easy to deploy and upgrade. The directory structure, which we work with in this chapter, isn't a rule set in stone. In future you will, time after time, use different directory structures, which will be different than the one we will be using. That structure is only one of the options and a starting point for your needs, and it easily responds to changes caused by certain technical conditions.

Phalcon is not only the fastest framework in the world, it is one of the easiest frameworks. As a rule, you don't need any special knowledge or additional software. However, when developing an application with Phalcon, you will need to create a base system configuration and application skeleton. In this chapter, we will learn how to deploy an application with the use of Phalcon, how to make its base configuration, and how to create a flexible and efficient application skeleton, which you can use in future.

Any object-oriented PHP application needs classes. You have to tell your class autoloader where your classes are situated and which way they can be searched for. We will look at some possible options of class auto-loading in Phalcon and their usage methods.

Many developers, despite their experience, have difficulty when working with a Request component. Phalcon isn't an exception. We will discover how to make a base application configuration so that Phalcon starts handling requests. We will learn how Phalcon handles these requests and in what sequence they are executed. We will learn which components take part in a request life cycle, where it is possible to catch the request, how to specify its state, as well as how to take any suitable actions.

Getting your IDE to work nicely with Phalcon

Most IDEs have some form of code completion as part of the program. To enable auto-completion for Phalcon's namespaces, we will need to help the IDE recognize those namespaces. We will also see how to enable Volt syntax highlighting and Phalcon API auto-completion for major IDEs.

Getting ready

To get started, we should have Git installed. To enable auto-completion in your IDE, you need to get the Phalcon stubs. For these purposes, clone the Phalcon Developer Tools repository:

git clone [e-mail]:phalcon/phalcon-devtools.git

How to do it…

The following are the steps needed to complete this recipe.

Ways to enable Phalcon API autocompletion in major IDEs

PhpStorm

Using the Project Tool window in PhpStorm, select External Libraries, right-click on the section, and select Configure PHP Include Paths... from the drop-down menu.

Then, using the External Libraries dialog box, click the + button. Next, select the Specify Other... option in the drop-down menu and specify the location of the Phalcon stubs. The stubs are located in the phalcon-devtools repository you just cloned under the /ide subfolder. You should specify the path phalcon-devtools/ide/stubs/Phalcon and click on Apply.

NetBeans

In NetBeans, you need to open the Projects window (Ctrl + F1) and select Include Path. Right-click on the section and select Properties from the drop-down menu.

Then, open the Project Properties window and click on the Add Folder... button. Next, specify the location of the Phalcon stubs. The stubs are located in the phalcon-devtools repository you just cloned under the /ide subfolder. You should specify the path phalcon-devtools/ide/stubs/Phalcon and click on the OK button.

Ways to enable Volt syntax highlighting in major IDEs

Netbeans

Click on the Tools menu entry and select Options.

In the opened window, select Miscellaneous | Files.

In the File Associations group box, click on the button New… next to the File Extensions option, enter the extension volt, and click on OK.

Select TWIG(text/x-twig) in the Associated File Type (MIME) drop-down menu.

PhpStorm

Open File | Settings. Next select Editor | File Types.

In the Recognized File Types group box, select Twig and add the extension *.volt into the Registered Patterns group box by pressing the + button.

Syntax highlighting for Sublime Text or TextMate

Installation via Package Control

If you have Sublime Package Control, you know what to do. If not, well, it's a package manager for Sublime Text, and it's awesome!

After installing Sublime Package Control and restarting the editor:

Open theCommand Palette (Ctrl + Shift + P or Cmd + Shift + P).

Type Install Package and press Enter.

Find Volt and press Enter.

Manual installation

For manual installation, clone the Volt syntax highlight for the Sublime Text 2/Textmate repository:

[e-mail]:phalcon/volt-sublime-textmate.git

Depending on your OS, copy the volt-sublime-textmate/Volt directory to any of the following locations:

Sublime Text 2:

Mac OS X:

~/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 2/Packages

Linux:

~/.Sublime Text 2/Packages

Windows:

%APPDATA%/Sublime Text 2/Packages/

Sublime Text 3:

Mac OS X:

~/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 3/Packages

Linux:

~/.Sublime Text 3/Packages

Windows:

%APPDATA%/Sublime Text 3/Packages/

TextMate:

/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles

How it works…

Some IDEs need help understanding the framework syntax. To get the IDE to understand, we download a list of all the Phalcon stubs. Then, when we add it to the include path, NetBeans (or PhpStorm) will automatically check the file and show us the autocomplete options. To enable the Volt or Zephir syntax highlight, we have to configure our IDE or text editor accordingly.

Creating the application directory structure

In this recipe, we will take a brief look at the commonly used directory structure of a single module application. A structure of this type is aimed at providing a great starting point for different applications.

Getting ready

We don't need